Every spring, high school students descend on the headquarters of the New York Federal Reserve, a few blocks from Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. They compete to see who does the best impression of a central banker.

The High School Fed Challenge is a big deal. Schools like Montclair High in Montclair, New Jersey have multiple rounds of tryouts just to get on the team. Then they practice for months.

Dennis McLaughlin interviewed his mom, Theresa, to thank her for how she raised him. Born in 1948 with spina bifida, he was missing several vertebrae and was unable to use his legs. Theresa was a single mom, working in a paper mill near Portland, Maine.

"When you were 1 year old, your grandfather McLaughlin built you a little wheelchair," Theresa says, "built it out of wood that he had and wheels from a tricycle, and you got around in that very, very well."

A day after President Obama announced his support for gay marriage, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney avoided the issue at a campaign appearance Thursday in Nebraska.

But in an interview with Fox News, he reiterated his belief that same-sex couples should not be allowed to marry.

Obama has said his position on gay marriage "evolved" over time, and a case can be made that Romney's views on gay rights have changed as well.

The President of NARAL Pro-Choice America, the nation's oldest abortion rights organization, will step down in January, the group said today.

In a statement, Nancy Keenan said she would focus her last eight months "on helping pro-choice candidates win elections."

Let others get distracted by the news the day before that President Obama now personally supports gay marriage. Mitt Romney and Speaker John Boehner said Thursday they intended to stay on message and keep hitting the president in what they view as his Achilles heel — the economy.

Being that it's also the issue voters have in repeated polls said is most important to them, it was hard to argue with their decision.

Two police officers in the Southern California town of Fullerton have been ordered to stand trial for the death of Kelly Thomas, a mentally ill homeless man.

Thomas died in July 2011 from injuries sustained during a violent arrest by six Fullerton officers.

The night of the arrest, Fullerton police officer Manual Ramos approached Thomas, then 37, while responding to a call that someone had been peering into cars at the town's bus depot.

They're calling it a "rogue earthquake."

On April 11 of this year, one of the 10 biggest earthquakes ever recorded struck off the coast of Indonesia. It was felt from Bangladesh to Australia.

You may not have even heard of this magnitude 8.6 quake. It barely made the news in the U.S. because it did very little damage. Two people died, but there was no massive tsunami.

The fallout from the hazing scandal at Florida A&M University continued today: First there was news that after 40 years, the band director was stepping down and then there was news that Florida's top university official asked the university to keep the Marching 100 band off the field.

Despite the slow, twisting, synth-looping style of Polica, the group's album came together in only a few recording sessions. Recovering from the breakup of her folk rock band Roma di Luna and the breakup of her marriage to one of her bandmates, Channy Leaneagh turned to friend and collaborator Ryan Olson, founder of Gayngs. The two worked together on Gayngs' album Relayted in 2010 and they were interested in working together again.